SHERBORNE TO CERNE ABBAS AND WEYMOUTH
IT is twenty-six miles from stately Sherborne, the “Sherton Abbas” of
_The Woodlanders_, to where Weymouth sits enthroned on the margin of her
circular Bay, and, always supposing that no strong southerly gale is
blowing, there is for the cyclist no easier route in all the Hardy
Country. Bating the steep rise out of Sherborne and out of the Vale of
Blackmore to the chalk uplands at Minterne Magna, it is a route of
favourable gradients, with one interval of dead level.
The river Yeo is a small stream, but its valley is deep and wide, as he
who, leaving Sherborne, climbs the hills which shut in that valley, shall
find. But a reward comes with the easy descent to the long, scattered
street of rustic cottages at Long Burton, whence the way lies across a
dead level to where, six miles distant from this point, rise the bastions
of the mid-Dorset heights, seen distinctly from here: Dogbury, with his
convex clump of cresting trees, like a blue-black wig, High Stoy, where
the ridge runs bare, with Nettlecomb Tout and Bulbarrow in the hazy
distance.
It is a straight, and a marshy and low-lying, as well as a flat road to
Holnest, where, beside the road, is Holnest Lodge, belonging to the
Erle-Drax family, and one of the seats of that eccentric person, the late
J. S. W. Sawbridge Erle-Drax, of Charborough Park, long a member of
Parliament for Wareham, and one of the last of the squires. The old time
squires were laws to themselves, and like none others. The product of
generations of other many-acred squires of great port-drinking
propensities and unbounded local influence, whom all the lickings
administered at Eton did not suffice to bring to a proper sense of their
intrinsic unimportance, apart from the accidental circumstance that they
were the lords of their manors, “old Squire Drax,” as the rustics call
him now that he is dead, might from his high-handed ways have formed an
excellent model for a dramatist building up a melodrama of the old style.
He was “the Squire” to the very _n_th degree, with so extraordinary an
idea of his own importance that here, on the lawn fronting Holnest Lodge,
he caused to be erected in his own lifetime a memorial to himself. An
inspection of the approach to that residence will convince any one not
only that he was very rich, but very mad as well. The sweeping drive is
bordered at intervals with statues: Circes, Floras, Ceres, Dianas, and
other classical deities, shining whitely and conspicuously against the
grass, and leading the eye up to the central point where, on a tall
imposing column, guarded by crouching lions, stands the bronze,
frock-coated statue of Squire Drax himself. It is all very like a kind
of higher-class Rosherville, and exceedingly curious.
[Picture: Long Burton]
One has not progressed far along the dead-level road before another
evidence of the Drax swelled head comes in sight. It is a huge building
in the Byzantine style, highly elaborated, and decorated in a costly way
with polished stones. Its purpose puzzling at first, it is seen on
closer approach to stand in a churchyard and to be a mausoleum. Away
back from it stands in perspective the little church of Holnest, scarce
larger than this gorgeous place prepared by the squire for his rest, and
looking really smaller. The rustics dot the i’s and cross the t’s of his
eccentricity, telling how he had his coffin made in his lifetime and his
funeral rehearsed in front of the house. The more superstitious declare
that the mausoleum was built so strongly and substantially in order to
foil a certain personage whose desire is rather for the souls than for
the bodies of his own; and, to support their dark beliefs, narrate how,
canvassing for votes during the progress of an election the squire
declared he had always been a Member of Parliament, would always be, and
would rather go to the Pit with the initials of M.P. attached to his name
than to Heaven without them. Unfortunately, these wonder-mongers halt a
little short of the completeness desired by dramatic requirements, and do
not proceed to tell us how the election was secured by the agency of a
gentlemanly stranger of persuasive manners and club-feet, who, upon the
declaration of the poll mysteriously disappeared amid a strong smell of
Tandstickör matches.
[Picture: Holnest: the Drax Mausoleum]
Advancing, we come at Middlemarsh into the country of _The Woodlanders_,
where dense woodlands now begin to cover the levels. The long ridge of
the downs ahead now grows stern, steep, and threatening. To the left
hand an isolated protuberance, covered with trees, the oddly named
Dungeon Hill, rises, disclosing from its flanks peeps into the Vale of
Blackmore, where the explorer can, with promptitude and thorough
efficacy, lose himself. Believe one who has been along the sometimes
devious and sometimes straight, but always lonely, roads of these levels.
There, down beyond Dungeon Hill and Pulham, on a road flat as the
alliterative flounder and empty as a City church, stands at King’s Stag
Bridge across the river Lidden an inn with the sign of the White Hart and
a verse alluding to the origin of the name of “Vale of White Hart” given
to this part of the greater Vale of Blackmore—
“When Julius Cæsar Reigned here, I was but then a little Deer.
When Julius Cæsar Reigned King, around my Neck he put this Ring.
Whoever doth me overtake, Oh! spare my life, for Cæsar’s sake.”
[Picture: Dungeon Hill and the Vale of Blackmore]
The classic historian of Dorsetshire tells us something of the story thus
darkly reflected. According to his account, corrected in details from
other sources, it seems that King Henry III. hunting in what was then a
forest, rounded up, among several other deer, a particularly beautiful
white hart, whose life he spared for future hunting. Somewhat later, Sir
John de la Lynde, Bailiff of Blackmore Forest, a neighbouring gentleman
of ancient descent and local importance, out hunting with a party, roused
the same animal, and, less pitiful than the king, killed it at the end of
a long pursuit, at the spot ever after called King’s Stag Bridge. The
king, highly offended, not only punished Sir John de la Lynde and his
companions with imprisonment and heavy fines, but taxed their lands
severely and permanently, so that for many later generations the fine of
White Hart Silver continued to be paid into the Exchequer. Another
historian, the quaint and amusing Fuller, in giving his version, states
that the whole county was laid under contribution. “Myself,” he says
whimsically “hath paid a share for the sauce who never tasted the meat.”
It is stated that “White Hart Silver” was levied until the reign of Henry
VII.
The road, passing a signpost weirdly directing to “Giant’s Head,” ascends
a steep hill, perhaps the ‘Rubdon Hill’ of _The Woodlanders_, and the
Lyon’s Gate Hill of actual fact, down which, into the vale on that
autumnal day went Fitzpiers, the infatuated surgeon—a Dorsetshire
Tannhäuser, thinking of the Venus who had bewitched him, and careless of
the beauty of the season—when “the earth was now at the supreme moment of
her bounty. In the poorest spots the hedges were bowed with haws and
blackberries; acorns cracked underfoot, and the burst husks of chestnuts
lay exposing their auburn contents as if arranged by anxious sellers for
the market.” Steeply upward continues the hill, to the ridge of the
mid-Dorset heights, whence Blackmore Vale, of which it is very truly said
that “an unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather, is apt to
engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous, and miry ways,” is
seen spreading out like an unrolled map.
“This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are
never brown, and the springs never dry,” is bounded on the south by the
bold chalk ridge that embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill,
Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down. There
“in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more
delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from this
height their hedgerows appear a network of dark green threads
overspreading the paler green of the grass. The atmosphere beneath is
languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle
distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the
deepest ultramarine. Arable lands are few and limited; with but slight
exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling
minor hills and dales within the major. Such is the Vale of Blackmore.”
The village of Minterne Magna that, with its fine trees and the seat of
Lord Digby, has so handsome a presence, is the “Great Hintock” of _The
Woodlanders_. Poor loyal-hearted Giles Winterbourne, “a good man, who
did good things,” was buried here, beside that ivy-covered church-tower
overlooking the road, and now bearing the inscription
“LE TEMPS PASSE
L’AMITIE RESTE
1888
IN MEMORIAM H.R.D.”
They laid him to rest “on the top of that hill looking down into the
Vale,” to whose villages he had, as autumn came round, been wont to
descend with his portable cider-mill and press; and Grace rejoined her
husband, and the world went on as usual. Only Marty South remembered him
and treasured his memory.
At Minterne Magna, otherwise “Great Hintock,” according to a rustic
character, “you do see the world and life,” whereas, at Little Hintock,
to be identified with Melbury Osmund, away down at Evershot, “’tis such a
small place that you’d need a candle and lantern to find it, if ye don’t
know where ’tis.”
But, at the same time, outside the pages of novels Minterne Magna is not
a place of stir and movement, and is great only in name.
From just before Minterne Magna there is a left-hand turning which
affords an alternative route to Dorchester, avoiding Cerne Abbas, and
going exposedly over the haggard downs. The two routes are locally known
as the overhill and the underhill roads. The first-named is now little
travelled, and its old house of entertainment, the Revels inn, a thing of
the past. This, “the forsaken coach-road running in an almost meridional
line from Bristol to the south shore of England,” is the route of the
escaped prisoner and the scene of “Higher Crowstairs” in the intense
story of _The Three Strangers_. On that route you see better than
anywhere else, those “calcareous downs” described by the novelist, where
“the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give
an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges
low and splashed, the atmosphere colourless.” It is, by the same token,
of an exhausting dryness in summer, and in winter only to be undertaken
by the most robust.
By the ‘underhill’ road on the other hand, the ten miles from Minterne to
Dorchester are chiefly on a gentle descent. Presently, therefore, one
reaches Cerne Abbas, the “Abbot’s Cernel” of _Tess_ and other stories,
situated in a fine widening of the valley through which the river Cerne
flows, with the gaunt bare shoulders of the great chalk downs receding
far enough to lose something of their asperity, and to gain in distance
all the atmosphere and softened outlines of an impressionistic picture.
From the south, half a mile beyond the decayed town of Cerne, a very
beautiful view of this nature opens out, by the roadside. There the fine
tower of the church stands out against the sage-green coloration of the
hills, and with the luxuriant trees and the nestling farms of the valley,
presents by force of contrast with the bare uplands a striking picture of
comfort, prosperity, and hospitality, not perhaps warranted in every one
of those respects by a closer acquaintance. For Cerne is a place very
hardly treated by heartless circumstance.
Many centuries ago, in A.D. 987 to be exact, a Benedictine Abbey was
founded here by Ethelmar, Earl of Devon and Cornwall, upon the site of a
hermitage established by Ædwold, brother of that East Anglican saint,
Edmund the King and Martyr. It does not appear what became of the
hermit, whether those who established the abbey bought him out, or threw
him out; but it certainly seems to demand enquiry, the more especially
that hermits and abbots, pious founders and holy monks were not
altogether so unbusinesslike in their worldly affairs as the uninstructed
might imagine. The hermit probably received due compensation for
disturbance and went off somewhere else. However that may be, the abbey
grew and flourished. Canute certainly despoiled it, but more than made
amends, by large gifts and endowments of other people’s property, when he
had been brought to see the error of his ways and that
plundering—plundering the property of the church, at least—was wrong.
And so the business of the abbey progressed through the centuries, to the
daily accompaniment of the monks chanting “their wonderful piff-and-paff”
as the librettist of _The Golden Legend_ makes the devil say of it.
In 1471 Henry VI.’s Queen, Margaret of Anjou, striving desperately, brave
heart, on her son’s behalf, fled for shelter here, up the road from
Weymouth, where she had landed from France; but, indeed, little else of
history belongs to this sometime rich and splendid abbey in the heart of
the hills. It afforded shelter and protection to the townlet of Cerne
that had sprung up outside its precincts; and great therefore was the
dismay when ruin overtook it in the time of Henry VIII. The abbey
disestablished, the town of course also suffered. How greatly we do not
know; but it plucked up courage again and refused to die, and when
England was still that exceedingly uncomfortable England of coaching
times, flourished in a modest way on the needs of travellers for succour
and shelter on the exhausting journeys that are so romantic to read of in
Christmas numbers, but were the terror of those who could not possibly
stop at home.
[Picture: Cerne Abbas]
And at last the coaches ceased and railways came to the country in
general, but not to Cerne. It is still, to-day, remote from railways and
is thus hit several severe, separate, and distinct blows by Fate, which,
when travellers no longer needed its shelter, took away its chief reason
for existence, refused it the reinvigorating boon of a railway, and then,
in the general depression of agriculture, has dealt a final and
staggering buffet. Cerne is dead. There is (assuming for the moment
positive, comparative, and superlative degrees of deadness) no deader
townlet in England, and it has all the interest, and commands all the
respect due to the departed. _De mortuis nil nisi bonum_, and if there
were hard things to be said of Cerne, they should not here be uttered.
But there are no such things for utterance. It has all the romance of
the bygone that appeals to the artist, and I love to dwell upon and in
it. It is a place where commercialism has, or should have, no part, and
therefore, when I pass a noble-looking farmhouse and a somewhat stately
landlady comes out with a key, asking me—with an eye upon the perquisite
of the fee exacted—if I would like to see the Abbey Gatehouse, I refuse;
earning thereby the keen contempt shown on her expressive face. Soulless
Goth, to wander about Cerne and not see the Gatehouse! Ah! my dear lady,
your contempt is misplaced. I love these things better than you imagine,
but I hate commercialism—and in such unexpected places—the more. The
abbey ruins, wholly summed up in that Gatehouse, are at the extremity of
this dead town, but there is a fine parish church in the centre of its
streets. A noble, highly decorated tower is that belonging to it, one of
the finest productions of the Perpendicular period, with bold gargoyles,
whose gaping mouths are for the most part stopped with birds’ nests.
Decay and ruin squat next door, in the shape of one of Cerne’s wrecked
and unroofed houses, so long in that condition as to have become a
terrace on which wild flowers luxuriantly grow and display themselves to
passing admiration. It will be observed that there are shops—or things
in the specious and illusory shape of shops—in this town of Yester-year.
They indeed were so once, but the shopkeepers have long ceased from their
shopkeeping. The windows, perhaps retained over against that time when
Cerne shall be resurrected—for Fortune’s wheel still spins, and will come
full circle some day—are meanwhile excellent for displaying geraniums.
[Picture: The Gatehouse, Cerne Abbey]
[Picture: The Cerne Giant] Prominent in most views of Cerne Abbas is that
weird figure of a man on the hillside which gives an alternative name to
Trendle or Giant’s Hill. The “Giant of Cerne” is a big fellow, well
deserving his name, for he is 180 feet high. No one knows who cut him on
the chalk of the hillside, but local tradition has long told how the
figure commemorated the destruction of a giant who, feasting on the sheep
of Blackmore, laid himself down here, in the sleep of repletion, and was
then, like another Gulliver, pinioned where he lay by the enraged
peasantry, who killed him and immediately traced his dimensions for the
information of posterity. The prominence of his ribs, however, says
little for the result of his feeding.
A more instructed opinion is that the figure represents Heil, a god of
the pagan Saxons, and that it was cut before A.D. 600. Fearful legends
belong to it: tales of horror narrating how the border enclosing the
effigy is the ground plan of a stout wicker-work cage in which the pagan
priests imprisoned many victims, whom they offered up as burnt sacrifices
to their god.
Looked upon with awe and wonder by the peasantry of old, who cleaned him
once every seven years, the Giant is now regarded by them with
indifference and left alone, and it is only the stranger who finds
himself obsessed with a strange awe as he gazes upon this mystic relic of
a prehistoric age. His minatory and uncouth appearance—for the relation
of his head to his body is that of a pea to a melon—perhaps even more
than his size, impresses the beholder. It should be said that he is
merely traced in outline on the turf, in lines two feet broad and one
foot deep, and not laid bare, a huge white shape, to the sky. The club
he wields is 120 feet long, and from seven to twenty-four feet broad.